Making Comfrey Oil/Salve

Many are the benefits of comfrey however in most of the country you cannot cut green leaves from sometime in the fall until well into spring, something like 4-7 months depending on how far north you are. One option is to make comfrey oil and then turn that oil into a salve. I did this by taking a 2 gallon cheap stainless steel stock pot and filled it 3/4 of the way full with coarsely chopped comfrey leaves and then covered it with olive oil. I put a couple of bricks on my wood stove and set this pot on them. This provided a bit of space between the pot and the stove so it wasn’t as hot. This provided a gentle warming over several days and turned the olive oil even more green and gave it a different smell. Now I do not have any way to test this to determine how much of the comfrey goodness is infused in the oil, but this is the best I could do under home circumstances. The final step was to pour the contents of the pot into a sieve to strain out the leaves.

I like something thicker than oil to apply to my skin so my next step is to add beeswax at a 1:5 ratio which produces a firm salve. I melt the beeswax first and add oil to it and re-heat as needed. Doing it this way means you do not need to get all the oil heated up to the melting point of the beeswax, them more oil you get incorporated into the melted wax the lower the melting point of the mixture. Lastly I don’t particularly care for the smell of the comfrey oil so I added enough Lavender essential oil to make the smell something I found more pleasing. My son has real problems with dry cracked skin on his hands during the winter so he will be applying this every night and we will see what happens.